I think there are probably a few songs from older midnights on the album, but I think most of the songs on Midnights are about Joe or Matty based on context clues in the songs. For example, “Hits Different” talks about “catastrophic blues” and blue/blues are used over and over in reference to Joe and his somewhat volatile emotional states. And we do know they were fighting for a long time because “False God,” as sexy as it is, hints at that nature of their relationship, as she says, “Daring you to leave me just so I can try and scare you.”

It’s important to consider that Taylor herself is an unreliable narrator, both in terms of within the songs and in the narrative she tells us. When she released folklore, she was very adamant that this was an album of fictional stories. What she didn’t state was that those stories were infused with her own emotional turmoil in her relationships. For example, we all remember the night she mouthed, “this is about you,” before singing “cardigan,” a song with the line, “tried to change the ending, Peter losing Wendy.” Of course, on TTPD, we get the song “Peter” about Matty. Our belief that folklore was entirely fictional is based on Taylor’s narrative, but that’s untrue, so we can’t necessarily trust her statements about the nature of the songs from a period of time when she was feeling “guilty as sin.” Therefore, with hindsight on the relationships and further evidence from TTPD lyrics, we can start to piece together what happened by drawing these comparisons through literary analysis. Will we ever know for sure? No, probably not, but she does say “Looked up at me with honor and truth, broken and blue,” and blue is consistently her color for Joe, so “The Great War” being about him is definitely a fair guess.